Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Dunker

" 'Every writer has a Muse,' said the Germanist slowly, 'no matter how anti-Romantic they are. For the irredeemably boring the Muse is a woman they've cooked up in their heads, propped like a voodoo doll on a pedestal and then persecuted with illusions, obsessions and fantasies. Paul Michel wasn't like that. He wanted someone real; someone who challenged him, but whose passions were the same. He fell in love with Foucault. It is absolutely essential to fall in love with your Muse. For most writers the beloved reader and the Muse are the same person. They should be."

The author often becomes the object of projection, against which enthusiastic readers can exercise their passions and their imaginations. The image of the creative genius whose intensity makes them an awkward fit in the mundanity of the day to day is a cliche....but we love it, or should I say I love it. A reader can get attached to an author through their body of work or the mythology constructed around them, imagining a unique connection to their thoughts - imagining that in some small way that they are communicating just to you - how else would they be able to know reach you on such a level? The image of the muse enters into this relationship in a more obtuse way, the author or the artist projecting ideal qualities onto a person in order to create something transcendent, but less is said about your "ideal reader", a reader that will not only inspire but will speak back to your work, an active participant in your discursive activity. Hallucinating Foucault brings this character to the fore, the ideal reader for whom an unhinged author would write - of course it would be Foucault.
In her debut novel, Dunker introduces us to a nameless narrator whose academic ambitions are just challenging enough, whose personality is just interesting enough and whose course through life has been one uninterrupted smooth sail. The subject of his studies is a fictional novelist named Paul Michel, a man whose radical queer politics and narrative passions characterized his career. Abruptly, he ceased to write and at the start of the novel, has spent the last thirty or so years in an asylum in the French countryside. When our narrator begins an affair with another student whose passions for her Phd subject Schiller drive her to tears and fits of passion. She is the one to finally inspire and even pressure the narrator into his pursuit of Michel.
Adopting the pace of a mystery or a thriller, Dunker propels you into the intensity of the relationship between Michel and Foucault, between our narrator and Michel, between reader and writer.

Although you are eventually given details as to the elements of these relationships, which ostensibly solves the mysterious aspects of the novel, the central tensions remain engaged. Dunker is invested in the intimate connectedness of writers and their stories, the "Germanist" (the Phd studying Schiller) is eventually proved correct - the personal details of a writer's life are of equal importance to their fiction. The construction and maintenance of this tension betrays a kind of one to one correspondence that oversimplifies the intricacies of fictional worlds. In a way, this novel exists as a kind of wish fulfillment for the reader, proving ones own importance as a reader while romanticizing the author as a tortured artist.